From ‘How Peace of Mind is a Skill That Can Be Developed With Practice‘:
“The average person experiences thousands of thoughts every day, most of which flow into the mind without us even choosing like a fast-moving river. Most of these thoughts flow out of our mind as quickly as they come but not without leaving a residue on our unconscious. If even 15% of the thousands of thoughts that arrive in our brain every day are negative then that amounts to hundreds of negative thoughts in a single day. For most people the negative thoughts reach well into the thousands. Over a lifetime, this accumulative load of negativity can begin to have an effect on our health, our relationships with others and even on our self-identity.
We tend to think that a positive outlook results from external circumstances and forces that are outside of us. Though we might not actually express it so crudely, we intuitively assume that peace of mind results from getting what we want. While this may be partially true in some cases, it is more often the case that peace of mind results from the mindset we choose to adopt about our lives irrespective to what is happening around us.
Think of the brain as the theater of a constant tug-of-war between the positive and the negative side of us. The more our thought-life empowers the negative side in this tug-of-war the more we will be weighed down and actually make our suffering worse. The tug-of-war between the negative and the positive ultimately determines whether our life will be filled with joy, gratitude, and a sense of hopeful expectancy about the future, or whether our life will be weighed down by grumbling, stress, and a sense of anxiety about the future.”